This “pinkhouse” at Caliber Biotherapeutics in Bryan, Texas, grows 2.2 million plants under the glow of blue and red LEDs. Photo: Courtesy of Caliber Therapeutics

Post by Michaeleen Doucleff, The Salt at NPR Food (5/21/13)

The idea of vertical farming is all the rage right now. Architects and engineers have come up with spectacular concepts for lofty buildings that could function as urban food centers of the future.

An artist’s rendering of what a planned vertical farm in Linkoping, Sweden, will look like.
Photo: Courtesy of Plantagon

“The idea of taking a skyscraper and turning it into a vertical farming complex is absolutely ridiculous from an energy perspective,” says horticulturist Cary Mitchell of Purdue University, who’s been working on ways to grow plants in space for more than 20 years.

The future of vertical farming, Mitchell thinks, lies not in city skyscrapers, but rather in large warehouses located in the suburbs, where real estate and electricity are cheaper.

And oh, yeah, instead of being traditional greenhouses lit by fluorescent lamps, he says these plant factories will probably be “pinkhouses,” glowing magenta from the mix of blue and red LEDs.

Light is a major problem with vertical farming. When you stack plants on top of each other, the ones at the top shade the ones at the bottom. The only way to get around it is to add artificial light — which is expensive both financially and environmentally.

Vertical farmers can lower the energy bill, Mitchell says, by giving plants only the wavelengths of light they need the most: the blue and red.

“Twenty years ago, research showed that you could grow lettuce in just red light,” Mitchell says. “If you add a little bit of blue, it grows better.”

Plant’s photosynthesis machinery is tuned to absorb red and blue light most efficiently. They have a handful of other pigments in their leaves that catch other wavelengths, but the red and blue wavelengths are the big ones, supplying the majority of the light needed to grow.

Cary Mitchell and Celina Gomez, of Purdue University, harvest tomatoes grown next to a tower of blue and red LEDs. Photo: Courtesy of Purdue Agricultural Communication photo/Tom Campbell

And there’s another advantage to using LEDs in greenhouses and vertical farming, Mitchell says: Because these lights are cooler, you can place them close to the plants — even stacked plants — and lose even less energy.

Recently, Mitchell and his graduate student designed a 9-foot-tall tower of lights and grew tomato plants right up against it. “As the plants get taller, we turn on the [light] panels higher up,” he explains. “It takes about two months before all the panels are on.”

The towers cut energy consumption by about 75 percent, Mitchell and his team reported earlier this year.

Right now, experiments are using these specialized LEDs to supplement natural light, not replace it.

But as LEDs get more and more efficient, could growers forgo the natural light altogether and grow crops completely in enclosed rooms, where they’re protected from temperature changes or damaging pests?

That’s exactly what Barry Holtz, at Caliber Biotherapeutics, is already doing.

His farms have never seen the light of day.

Plants at Caliber Biotherapeutics grow under blue and red LEDs, with wavelengths of light that match those that get absorbed by the photosynthetic machinery. Photo: Courtesy of Caliber Biotherapeutics

“A photon is a terrible thing to waste,” Holtz tells The Salt. “So we developed these lights to correctly match the photosynthesis needs of our plants. We get almost 20 percent faster growth rate and save a lot energy.”

Holtz is growing a tobacco-like plant to make new drugs and vaccines. The indoor pinkhouse gives him tight control over the expensive crops, so his team can stop diseases and contamination.

Holtz says this type of indoor gardening isn’t going to replace traditional farms anytime soon. It’s still relatively expensive for growing food. “We couldn’t compete with iceberg lettuce farmers,” he says, “but for certain specialty crops, the economics wouldn’t be so bad.”

And, he says, the pinkhouse is actually quite efficient when it comes to water and electricity. “We’ve done some calculations, and we lose less water in one day than a KFC restaurant uses, because we recycle all of it.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

The Exploratorium’s new digs boast stellar water views. Photo: Amy Snyder

The museum cafe, long a place of soggy sandwiches and mediocre meals, is getting a makeover in the Bay Area. Case in point: The recently reopened Exploratorium in new digs at Pier 15 in San Francisco, which offers creative fare tied to the mission of the museum, known for its interactive exhibits and playful approach, designed to encourage curiosity and experimentation.

Think seawater cocktails. Honeycomb with almonds and apricots. And living or fermented foods.

Visitors have three eating options: The 200-seat Seaglass restaurant, complete with panoramic views, a glass-topped raw bar, and open kitchen, which serves up familiar, family-friendly fare like tacos, pizza, and sandwiches — albeit with a sustainable pedigree — along with more adventurous eats such as marinated sardines, batter-fried green beans, and kelp salad with quinoa. There’s even a local riff on Welsh Rarebit (that’s gussied up grilled cheese to the uninitiated.) A full-bar serves cocktails promising a taste of the sea and in-vogue drinking vinegars known as shrubs. Near the museum’s Embarcadero entrance, the Seismic Joint offers take-away chow such as a chickpea-battered fish fingers, various spins on clam chowder, salads, and sandwiches. Mobile food trikes (built by Luigi Oldani and crew of CRO Cafe) roam the floors, peddling espresso Thanksgiving coffee, baked goods, and Strauss organic soft-serve ice cream.

The culinary duo behind the Exploratorium’s restaurant menu features acclaimed chef Loretta Keller of Coco500, a perennial Chronicle Top 100 restaurant, and her Coco500 partner, catering operations manager Clay Reynolds. The pair, who previously partnered with Charles Phan of Slanted Door fame to run The Moss Room at The California Academy of Sciences, have teamed up with Bon Appetit Management Company, known for its emphasis on scratch cooking with sustainably sourced ingredients, for the Exploratorium’s edible enterprises to form the Curiosity Catering Company.

Keller talked with BAB about her plans to feed people well and offer a side of education at the Exploratorium.

Clay Reynolds and Loretta Keller join forces at the Exploratorium. Photo: Gayle Laird

What got you excited about creating food for the Exploratorium?

What resonated with me about this project was a sense of place. The Exploratorium moved from this dark, cavernous space to a venue 800 feet over the water. Place is both a subject to explore and engage with at the Exploratorium. For me that means something in terms of food but also as a human being.

The environment and human experience, that’s everything to me. The importance of farming and where our food comes from is a very familiar mantra in the Bay Area. When you spend as much time as I do as a professional inside the food industry here you can get to a point where you’re in your own zip code. It can become precious and you can lose sight of the fact that our work is not done.

More than any other reason to be involved here, the museum offers a new and incredibly creative, intelligent and organic opportunity to do work on environmental consciousness, sustainability, and awareness around food and the planet. The Exploratorium is a great way to shake things up and have people engage with an exhibit in a hands-on way. That’s where the learning begins.

Is that where the honeycomb comes in?

Yes. The honeybee is in peril so by serving the honeycomb I’m hoping to help people stop and think and connect the bee with the almonds and the apricots — that’s why those things are always going to accompany the honeycomb. We want it to be a real exhibit and educational model that people will become intrigued by and realize how endangered bees are, which means your almonds are endangered, and all your stone fruit is endangered, and a whole way of eating is at risk. Bees are struggling with so many things right now; they’re overworked and experience bee jet lag. Bees want to winter in Florida, but instead almond growers in California pay exorbitant prices to have them flown or trucked here and put to work to meet demand. California is the biggest producer of almonds in the world, something like 70 percent, and people just take that for granted.

Japanese chef Sachio Kojima, who developed fervent fans for his sushi over the years, heads up Seaglass’s seafood and fermentation section. Photo: Gayle Laird

How are you incorporating living and fermented foods into the menu?

We are so lucky to have master chef Sachio Kojima, who had his own popular restaurant, Kabuto Sushi A&S, on Geary for more than 20 years, come on as our director of fermentation. He’s making seaweed and kelp salads, with kelp gathered from Marin, Mendocino, and Monterey counties, we’ll have algae on the menu too. And from our pickling program, we’ll offer traditional Japanese pickles, kimchi, and sauerkraut.

Visitors to the Exploratorium’s Seaglass restaurant can order from a raw bar full of sustainable seafood.
Photo: Gayle Laird

Where does sustainable seafood fit in?

We are doing an ocean bar, serving sushi, sashimi, and oysters that Sachio oversees as well. It’s all West Coast, Monterey Bay Watch-sanctioned seafood.

We missed the herring run this season but we’ll be serving herring next Spring. And we’ll serve anchovies in season too; these are really the last of the commercial fisheries within the bay. People have to understand that their choices are becoming so limited with regards to fish. There are very few wild fish that are sustainable. So we’ll be serving what people think of as bait and also serving whole fish. That starts a conversation in the U.S. because most people here are not used to seeing a whole fish or bait on a plate.

Sea grapes add a salty kick to cocktails at the Exploratorium. Photo: Loretta Keller

What about seawater and its connection to the new space?

My partner Clay Reynolds wanted to serve filtered seawater to drink, but the technology isn’t quite there. And then we wanted to run the dishwasher on seawater but it became clear that that was a whole project on its own. But the Exploratorium is using seawater to heat the building, which is quite extraordinary.

We’re using seawater in a cocktail. It turns out that the health department doesn’t recognize seawater as a consumable, so we’re not allowed to serve seawater per se. But there are kelps available that contain seawater, and there’s a Monterey County kelp called sea grape, that we add to our signature martini, which tastes great with a little bit of seawater. So we’re garnishing the drink with this kelp whose buds are full of seawater, when you burst them in your mouth you get a nice jolt of salt.

We’re including seawater in other ways in the restaurant too. The multi-hued glass tiles are based on a museum exhibit called “Color of Water.” To create the piece, a fixed-position camera took time-lapse photos of the bay, the color variations are caused by sunlight, tides, and microorganisms.

The piece in the dining room called “Thermal Mixing” also demonstrates the dynamics of the bay: It’s a triptych of panels of colored water of different temperatures that swirl like giant mood rings on the back wall. “Icy Bodies” is an exhibit where fragments of dry ice are pushed into a tank and spin around like comets across a sheet of water below a glass-topped bar. All these are nods to one of the most extraordinary places on the planet for moving water.

What role does food play at the museum?

By and large, with few exceptions, the food served at museums in this country is like prison food, just terrible. All this money was being spent on creating the new Exploratorium, which is a gift to residents and visitors of San Francisco, and so it’s critical that the food match the museum and its surroundings.

First and foremost we want to serve healthy, well-prepared fresh food to the museum goers, that’s our mandate. The challenge within that framework is to build in education, implicitly and explicitly, about sustainability. I get to be creative and think outside the box. We plan to do corn education tied to an exhibit and blind wine tastings at our adult nights. At the Exploratorium it’s not about looking at stuff, it’s about interacting with stuff. There’s an intimacy here that provides a direct way to get to people’s minds. And food has always been a great platform to reach people because it is so intimate and it’s a necessity; people have to eat every day. There aren’t that many mediums that offer that.

Details:

The restaurant is open during regular museum hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10am-5pm; Wednesday evenings until 10pm; every Thursday evening adults only (ages 18 and up) 6pm-10pm. It caters primarily to museum guests, but the public can access the restaurant from an exterior entrance.

Crew members unload a catch of sockeye salmon at Craig, Alaska, in 2005. Researchers say fish are being found in new areas because of changing ocean temperatures. Photo: Melissa Farlow/National Geographic/Getty Images

Listen to the Story on All Things Considered

Post by Richard Harris, The Salt at NPR Food (5/15/13)

Climate change is gradually altering the fish that end up on ice in seafood counters around the world, according to a new study.

“The composition of the [global] fish catch includes more and more fish from the warmer areas, and cold-water fish are getting more rare, because the temperatures are increasing,” says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia, a co-author of the study.

As oceans warm — a result of climate change — fish maintain their preferred water temperature by moving away from the equator and toward the poles.

So, for example, people in Denmark are now encountering swordfish, which you’d normally find in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Africa.

“In British Columbia, where I live, we have Humboldt squid, giant squid from Mexico,” Pauly says. “They eat all the herrings and stuff, and people don’t know them. They are stranded on the beach, and people think they are sea monsters.”

And fishermen have scuffled over Atlantic mackerel quotas, as the fish moves north to new grounds around Iceland.

The new study in Nature shows these anecdotes aren’t simply a fluke. Data from fish catches from around the world show it’s happening everywhere the ocean is warming — which is just about everywhere.

This trend isn’t obvious at American fish counters. That’s because 80 percent of our seafood is imported, and we don’t know whether fishermen are catching our swordfish in the tropics or the North Atlantic. Also, half of all seafood is now produced in enclosures — not caught in the wild.

But if it’s invisible to us, that’s not the case for many people who rely on their local fisherman for protein.

“In the tropics, there are lots of developing countries’ fisheries where their ability to adapt to changes in the resources is much lower,” says William Cheung, the report’s lead author. Like Pauly, he’s at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Vancouver.

The paper documents a migration of some species out of the tropics, as they seek cooler waters. But there are no fish to replace the ones that are leaving. As a result, “these fisheries in the tropics will be most vulnerable to climate change impacts,” Cheung says.

The United States will gradually feel the effects as well.

“Imagine a reef fish that is driven by temperature into North Carolina or the Delaware coast,” Pauly says. “That reef fish will not find reefs. It’s like you having to move, but you cannot take your furniture with you, or your house. That is the problem.”

Many fish will have a hard time adapting to this very rapid change, he says.

Mark Payne at the National Institute for Aquatic Resources in Denmark was not involved in the research, but he’s impressed by the result.

“This is suddenly a wake-up call,” he says. “It’s a strong suggestion that climate change is here. It’s real, and it’s really starting to affect what we catch and, therefore, what we eat.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

A vendor sells edible insects at Talad Thai market on the outskirts of Bangkok. The most popular method of preparation is to deep-fry crickets in oil and then sprinkle them with lemongrass slivers and chilis. Photo: NARONG SANGNAK/EPA /Landov

Post by Eliza Barclay, The Salt at NPR Food, (5/14/13)

Yes, we talk a lot about eating bugs here at The Salt. We know, because some of you have complained about it.

But insect cuisine isn’t just a crazy fad for Bay Area and Dutch foodies, or for Israelis plagued by locusts: In a report out this week, the U.N.’s agricultural arm makes the case for why insects should be an option for dinner.

The Food and Agriculture Organization has been pondering bugs as a protein source since 2003, but in the new report, the agency argues that insects might be essential to feeding a planet of 7 billion people. Why? They’re nutritious, better for the environment than other protein sources and can generate jobs, according to the FAO.

“Insects are pretty much untapped for their potential for food, and especially for feed,” Eva Muller, director of FAO’s Forest Economics, Policy and Products Division, said in a statement.

Of course, 2 billion people worldwide already enjoy insects with gusto — in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Australia. As The Salt previously reported, some efforts have focused on “grow-your-own-insect” kits as a form of emergency food aid for African refugees. Among the most popular of the 1,900 species consumed are beetles, caterpillars, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts and crickets. But rich nations have turned up their noses at them, and the FAO says it’s high time for that to change.

There are some signs that investors are warming to insect farming, as climate change has a lot of people rethinking where we get our protein. And insects are now looking like a pretty appealing alternative: They emit considerably less greenhouse gases and waste than animals, they require little to no land, and many species can consume waste products like animal blood, which means we wouldn’t need to produce feed (like soybeans or corn) especially for them.

And if you want to talk about feed efficiency, insects use just 2 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of meat. Cattle, at the other end of the spectrum, require 8 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of beef, the FAO says. Locusts beat out beef when it comes to essential nutrients like iron, too: between 8 and 20 milligrams per 100 grams of dry weight of locusts, compared with 6 milligrams per 100 grams of dry weight of beef.

In addition to bugs to feed people, the FAO is optimistic about opportunities to raise insects to feed to animals. As we reported last year, fly farming in South Africa is starting to get off the ground. Just last week, entrepreneur Jason Drew, who’s raising flies to feed salmon and chicken, won the highly competitive U.N. Innovation Prize for Africa.

So why haven’t we seen a big insect farming boom yet?

There’s the disgust factor, for one thing. But there are also big regulatory hurdles: In many countries, the FAO says, regulations on producing insects for food aren’t very clear. (Ironically, in the U.S., regulations allow for a certain amount of insect bits to make it into our food, but they don’t cover insects as the main meal, according to the FAO.)

Then there are all sorts of food safety concerns. For example, if you were to raise flies on animal blood — a normal source of food for the insects — what happens if you then feed the flies to chickens meant for human consumption? The FAO is calling for more research to untangle such questions.

But FAO says the future is bright for edible insects. “Although it will require considerable convincing to reverse [feelings of disgust], it is not an impossible feat,” the report states. British artists seem to agree: A recent exhibition at the U.K.’s Wellcome Collection showcased 3-D printing demos of “possible novel insect foods” of the future.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Through the City Land Application of Biosolids Program in Geneva, Ill., the fertilizer supplement is provided to local farmers at no cost. Photo: City of Geneva/Flickr

Post by Eliza Barclay, The Salt at NPR Food (5/12/13)

Any gardener will tell you that compost is “black gold,” essential to cultivating vigorous, flavorful crops. But it always feels like there’s never enough, and its weight and bulk make it tough stuff to cart around.

I belong to a community garden in Washington, D.C., that can’t get its hands on enough compost. So you can imagine my delight when I learned that the U.S. Composting Council was connecting community gardeners with free material from local facilities through its Million Tomato Compost Campaign.

I signed us up last month, and was promptly contacted by Clara Mills, the environmental coordinator for Spotsylvania County in central Virginia. Mills volunteered to deliver a dump truck full of compost to our garden from her facility, an hour away. It sounded too good to be true. Then one of my fellow gardeners noticed the source of the Spotsylvania compost: biosolids, or human poop that’s been treated and transformed into organic fertilizer.

About 50 percent of the biosolids produced in the U.S. are returned to farmland through a process that is heavily regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. Even so, some people – including the Sierra Club — remain skeptical of the use of this waste product in food production. They worry that heavy metals, pathogens or pharmaceuticals might survive the treatment process and contaminate crops. So what’s an urban gardener to do in light of mixed perceptions about whether it’s OK to use poop to grow your food?

I set out to investigate this, hoping that whatever I learned would help my garden decide whether to accept the donation or not.

First, remember that for thousands of years, before the invention of synthetic fertilizer in 1913, many farmers utilized their decomposed sewage, sometimes called “night soil,” to replenish the soil with nutrients lost in farming. The Chinese were especially adept at using human waste this way – one historical account notes that in 1908, a contractor paid the city of Shanghai $31,000 in gold for the privilege of collecting 78,000 tons of human waste and carting it off to spread on fields.

When growing urban areas required that sewage be piped outside of the city, the practice dropped off and attention turned to improving wastewater treatment to avoid polluting waterways. Raw waste is, of course, nasty stuff until all the dangerous bacteria have been killed off, either by heat or anaerobic digestion.

But the sludge was still piling up in landfills, so scientists began testing how to use it in agriculture safely; the waste was a free source of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, afterall. And letting it sit in landfills or incinerating it created its own environmental issues. By the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency created strict standards with two tiers for biosolids still in use today. To sell Class A biosolids to farmers and gardeners, facilities have to ensure that there are no dangerous heavy metals or bacteria in the end product.

The ick factor, however, has not faded entirely. While plenty of large-scale farms like this one in Kansas City, Mo., use biosolids, they are not officially allowed in organic agriculture. Bowing to public input, the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided in 2000 to prohibit the use of sludge in the National Organic Program. This was in spite of the fact that “there is no current scientific evidence that use of sewage sludge in the production of foods presents unacceptable risks to the environment or human health,” USDA spokesman Samuel Jones tells The Salt.

A handful of activists have also sounded the alarm on the widespread use of biosolids in conventional agriculture. They allege, among other things, that the EPA-approved treatment of biosolids doesn’t address all the possible contaminants in the waste.

A National Academy of Sciences report in 2002 also stated that while there have been some anecdotal stories of adverse health effects from exposure to biosolids, there are no studies that prove a causal link. Still, the NAS said that since biosolids may contain substances like chemicals and pharmaceuticals, more epidemiological research was needed to explore possible health effects of using them to grow food. (Currently, the U.S. Geological Service is investigating exactly what happens to plants when biosolids are applied to soil.)

Still, some scientists argue that over the years, the biosolids industry has gotten much better at keeping contaminants out of the final product.

“We have systemically looked at all kinds of potential hazards,” says Ian Pepper, a professor and director of the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona who has been studying biosolids for 30 years. “Invariably we’ve found that the risks are much lower than those suggested by environmental activists.”

And other proponents say that it’s hard to prove that biosolids are a significant source of contaminants.

“These compounds are ubiquitous in the environment – in the soil, water, within our bodies,” says Neil Zahradka, who overseas biosolids for the state of Virginia’s department of environmental quality. “So the question is: If it’s in the biosolids, then is that a problem? None of studies so far have been able to conclusively say that yes there’s an issue here.”

As for the pathogens, Zahradka contends that the composting process, one of a few different treatment methods (and the one used in Spotsylvania County, which offered compost to my garden), eliminates them.

Here’s how it works: Spotsylvania receives the raw sewage and mixes it with mulch. The carbon in the mulch speeds up the decomposition process, and generates heat. The material reaches 160 plus degrees for 21 days, says Mills. That’s enough to kill all harmful bacteria, she says. But the facility also tests the material regularly to be sure the pathogens and dangerous heavy metals are below detectable levels.

So will my garden be using these biosolids anytime soon? We’ll have to take a vote to decide. In the meantime, it’s interesting to see other urban gardeners getting on board with biosolids.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

A worker harvests cabernet sauvignon grapes at a vineyard near Bordeaux, France, in September. Photo: Caroline Blumberg/EPA/Landov

Post by Alastair Bland, The Salt at NPR Food (5/8/13)

Bordeauxs and Burgundys haven’t changed much since the days when famous wine-lover Thomas Jefferson kept the cellars of his Parisian home well-stocked with both wines.

But now, some worry that the regional rules and traditions that have defined top winemaking regions like Champagne, Burgundy and Chianti for centuries could melt away as climate change takes effect.

The main concern is that grape varieties that have brought renown and reputation to certain appellations — the syrah grapes of the French Rhone Valley, or the cabernet sauvignon of Bordeaux — may no longer thrive in those places several decades from now. Some people say there is little reason to fear, but others are already thinking ahead about which grape varieties will work best in their regions under forecast temperature changes. And it’s possible that old wine standards and definitions, revered like religion for ages, could be rewritten as winemakers adapt to a warmer future.

“As grape-growing suitability moves northward, I believe the winemaking regulations of Europe could break down quickly,” says Lee Hannah, a University of California, Santa Barbara-based climate specialist with Conservation International. He co-authored a recent study in the journal Science forecasting how climate change might reshape the global winemaking map.

Already, climate change is creating new winners among Europe’s winemakers. In southern England, warmer temperatures are credited with setting off a sparkling wine boom. In Germany, where Riesling and Gewurztraminer have long been superstars, new grape varieties are beginning to thrive, says German viticulturist Hans Reiner Schultz, a professor at Hochschule Geisenheim University.

“The pinot noir we’re growing is now fit to challenge the French,” Schultz says.

Meanwhile, winemakers in other parts of the continent are feeling the heat, and there is increasing discussion about changing the rules to allow them to introduce grape varieties that are currently prohibited but likely to thrive under future climate conditions.

And grape growers, who must look ahead decades to when their vines will be in prime production, may soon be planting new varieties of vines known to produce fruit better in warmer, drier climates. Experimental government vineyards are already doing this.

“Changing grapevine varieties is absolutely an option, not in a short term, but by 2050 to 2070,” Kees Van Leeuwen, of the Agricultural University of Bordeaux, tells The Salt. “We are currently experimenting in our research center [the Institut des Sciences de la Vigne et du Vin] how later-ripening varieties behave in the Bordeaux climate.”

Late-ripening varieties are considered the best candidates for helping regions adapt to climate change. That’s because, in general, the later that grapes ripen, the better their sugar-acid balance — an important component in winemaking.

When grapes ripen especially early — as they do in warm years — they may fail to develop the acidity necessary for making good wine. This means that many grapes that currently ripen in the optimal harvest time of September might, in a warmer future, become relatively useless to some winemakers who use them today.

Leeuwen says changing French laws on regional grape use won’t be easy, and could take as long as 15 years.

Other regulations are already breaking down – such as laws forbidding irrigation. The practice is considered taboo by many, and some wine critics feel it can result in watery-tasting wines.

But in exceptionally hot and dry conditions, watering vines can help increase the yield of fruit. And in 2006, the French government decided to do away with its prohibition on irrigating. Anti-irrigation laws have also been loosened in parts of Spain, says Schultz.

“When they changed the rule [in France], it was like a second French Revolution, because many people were very, very opposed to this,” Schultz says. Now, he adds, “there is no more talk of prohibiting irrigation.”

That rule change comes at a cost, says Leeuwen. He says irrigation can increase the soil’s salinity level, which can be harmful to grapes. In Bordeaux and other fine wine regions, where the richness of the dirt is credited for the quality of the wine, the consequences of irrigation could be dire. Leeuwen says salinity buildup in some southern Australian vineyards is causing winemakers to abandon them.

But Michel Chapoutier, a winemaker in the Rhone Valley, has more confidence in the future. He thinks current regulations already give winemakers all the leeway they need to use different grape varieties to adapt to climate change. A Bordeaux will still be a Bordeaux, he argues, without a change in rules or a compromise in quality — winemakers will merely have to adjust their blend ratios.

“Bordeaux [winemakers] will lower their amount of merlot and will raise their amount of petit verdot, while the Southern Rhone will lower their amount of syrah and raise their amounts of grenache and mourvedre,” Chapoutier says.

Lamberto Frescobaldi, of his family’s winery in Tuscany, says he believes old traditions should not be allowed to hinder winemakers from adapting to climate change — even if it means permitting new grapes in their wines. But he doubts that Tuscan winemakers will ever let sangiovese, the main variety of the region, slip to the wayside.

Schultz, too, expects that historically dominant wine regions will do everything they can to avoid giving up the grapes that have defined them for centuries.

“Burgundy without a pinot noir or chardonnay,” he says, “would not be the Burgundy we know.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

A bee inspector checks on a frame of bees to assess the colony strength near Turlock, Calif., in February. More than 30 percent of America’s bee colonies died off over the winter. Photo: Gosia Wozniacka/AP

Listen to the Story on All Things Considered

Post by Dan Charles, The Salt at NPR Food (5/7/13)

According to a new survey of America’s beekeepers, almost a third of the country’s honeybee colonies did not make it through the winter.

That’s been the case, in fact, almost every year since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began this annual survey, six years ago.

Over the past six years, on average, 30 percent of all the honeybee colonies in the U.S. died off over the winter. The worst year was five years ago. Last year was the best: Just 22 percent of the colonies died.

“Last year gave us some hope,” says Jeffrey Pettis, research leader of the Agriculture Department’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

But this year, the death rate was up again: 31 percent.

Six years ago, beekeepers were talking a lot about “colony collapse disorder” — colonies that seemed pretty healthy, but suddenly collapsed. The bees appeared to have flown away, abandoning their hives.

Beekeepers aren’t seeing that so much anymore, Pettis says. They’re mostly seeing colonies that just dwindle. As the crowd of bees gets smaller, it gets weaker.

“They can’t generate heat very well in the spring to rear brood. They can’t generate heat to fly,” he says.

Farmers who grow crops like almonds, blueberries and apples rely on commercial beekeepers to make sure their crops get pollinated.

But the number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate those crops.

Pettis says that this year, farmers came closer than ever to a true pollination crisis. The only thing that saved part of the almond crop in California was some lovely weather at pollination time.

“We got incredibly good flight weather,” Pettis says. “So even those small colonies that can’t fly very well in cool weather, they were able to fly because of good weather.”

A bee collects nectar from a fruit tree in West Bath, Maine. The number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate some major U.S. crops. Photo: Pat Wellenbach/AP

“It’s just something that gets in your blood, so you don’t want to give up. [You say,] ‘OK, it’s 30 percent this year; I’ll do better next year.’ We’re very much optimists,” he says.

Beekeepers have a whole list of reasons for why so many colonies are dying. There’s a nasty parasite called the Varroa Mite, which they can’t get rid of. There are also bee-killing pesticides. And there are just fewer places in the country where a bee can find plenty of flowering plants that provide nectar and pollen.

That was especially true this past year. The same drought that left Midwestern corn fields parched and wilting also dried up wildflowers and starved the bees.

That was a natural disaster. But May Berenbaum, who chairs the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that most of the changes in the landscape are the result of people’s decisions about what to do with their land.

“I just wish there were more incentives for people — not just farmers — to plant a more diversified landscape that provides nutritional resources for all kinds of pollinators,” she says. “Plant more flowers! And be a little more tolerant of the weeds in the garden.”

More controversial is the role of pesticides. Some beekeepers and environmentalists are calling for tighter restrictions on the use of one particular class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Europe is about to ban some uses of these pesticides. But U.S. farmers and pesticide companies are opposed to any such move here, and the Environmental Protection Agency says it’s not yet convinced that this would help bees very much.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

An overseer sits in the shade while workers collect coffee beans on a Brazilian plantation, circa 1750.
Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Listen to the Story on Morning Edition

Post by Lydia Zuraw, The Salt at NPR Food (04/24/13)

Coffee is a powerful beverage. On a personal level, it helps keep us awake and active. On a much broader level, it has helped shape our history and continues to shape our culture.

Coffee plants grow wild in Ethiopia and were probably used by nomadic tribes for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 1400s that people figured out they could roast its seeds. “Then it really took off,” historian Mark Pendergrast — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World — tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

By the 1500s, he says, the drink had spread to coffeehouses across the Arab world. Within another 150 years, it took Europe by storm.

“It actually had a major impact on the rise of business,” Pendergrast says. Coffeehouses became a spot not just to enjoy a cup but to exchange ideas.

The insurer Lloyd’s of London was founded hundreds of years ago in one of London’s 2,000 coffeehouses, he notes. Literature, newspapers and even the works of great composers like Bach and Beethoven were also spawned in coffeehouses.

It is often said that after the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists raided British tea ships and threw crates of tea into the harbor, Americans universally switched over to drinking coffee.

“There’s a lot of truth to the story, I found,” Pendergrast says. He cites a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in which the Founding Father proclaims his love of tea but says he will have to learn to embrace coffee instead, because drinking tea had become unpatriotic.

For all the upsides coffee has brought the modern world, it also ushered in its fair share of downsides, too. Europeans carried coffee with them as they colonized various parts of the world, and this frequently meant they enslaved people in order to grow it.

“One of the ironies about coffee is it makes people think. It sort of creates egalitarian places — coffeehouses where people can come together — and so the French Revolution and the American Revolution were planned in coffeehouses,” Pendergrast says. “On the other hand, that same coffee that was fueling the French Revolution was also being produced by African slaves who had been taken to San Domingo, which we now know as Haiti.”

In Brazil — where slavery was legal until 1888 — coffee plantations would use slash-and-burn agriculture, tearing down rain forests and planting coffee trees that depleted the nutrients in soil. Once the soil had been sapped, growers would move on to another place.

And then there are history’s many coffee naysayers. In 1511, for example, the governor of Mecca banned coffee because his medical advisers warned it was bad for people’s health. In 1674, women in London were convinced that coffee made their husbands impotent.

And yet, in an age when beer soup was the breakfast of champions, coffee had one undeniable health benefit: “Western civilization sobered up,” Pendergrast says. Coffee, he says, “had a very good impact in many ways on our civilization, even though it was, for a long time, grown by slaves.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Missouri farmer Gary Riedel says wet weather will put him about a month behind last year’s planting.
Photo: Abbie Fentress Swanson for NPR

Listen to the Story on Morning Edition

Post by Abbie Fentress Swanson, The Salt at NPR Food (4/24/13)

Last year’s drought wreaked havoc on farmers’ fields in much of the Midwest, cutting crop yields and forcing livestock producers to cull their herds. This spring, the rain that farmers needed so badly in 2012 has finally returned. But maybe too much, and at the wrong time.

It’s almost the end of April, which is prime time to plant corn. But farmers need a break in the rain so they can get this year’s crops in the ground and try to lock in good yields at harvest.

“There are other things that can limit yield, and planting date isn’t necessarily even the most important one,” says University of Missouri agronomist Brent Myers. “But it is something we have to consider. And we want to try to get that corn planted in that timely window of, say, after the first week of April to the first week in May.”

At his farm in Centralia, Mo., Gary Riedel, 69, in his green baseball cap and Western-style shirt, is just itching to plant corn on 1,000 acres of his 2,300-acre farm. He pulls open the lid from one of his planter’s hoppers and shows me the salmon-colored corn seed that’s all ready to go.

“Last year, I believe I started planting on the 28th of March, and this year, it may be the 28th of April, the way it’s beginning to look,” Riedel says. “It’s just that the later we get, the more we are subject to problems from pollination due to hot weather.”

Excessive heat and dryness can hurt corn pollination and stunt growth, leading to lower yields. So farmers try to plant early — especially with corn still getting about $6.50 a bushel. (As The Salt reported last year, corn farmers made serious money, even though yields were down.) The U.S. Department of Agriculture says by this time last year, 26 percent of the country’s corn crop was already planted. This year, farmers only have 4 percent of their corn in the ground.

We walk out to one of his misty fields, and Riedel points to the reason.

“See there, you can see a water puddle out in the field,” he says. “We’re going to have to wait till that dries up.”

But even when the puddle dries, it still might take a while to get corn into the ground. Planting in cold, wet soil can cause all kinds of problems for corn seedlings, including that they can’t take root or emerge above ground.

By this time last year, 26 percent of the country’s corn crop was already planted. A wet, cold spring means that only 4 percent is in the ground right now. Photo: Seth Perlman/AP

But even up until January, this moisture is what farmers had been hoping for. Last year’s drought led to a 13 percent drop in corn production, which in turn led to tight corn stocks and increased competition for corn between ethanol plants and livestock producers. The shortfall is also hurting corn exports, which are now at a 40-year low.

“A good production year would mean there would be less competition and would improve margins,” says Sterling Liddell, an agricultural economist with Rabo AgriFinance. “Especially in the cattle industry, which has suffered the most.”

Last year’s drought moved many farmers, including Gary Riedel, to increase the amount of crop insurance they carry. Peggy Smart, 77, also upped her coverage. Along with her family, she plants corn, soybeans and wheat on 6,000 acres of Missouri River bottomland in Tebbetts, Mo.

But nothing is planted yet. “We just don’t have enough sunshine,” she says.

Both Smart and Riedel are hoping to minimize the risks of bad weather by trying out drought- and flood-tolerant hybrid seeds this year. But first, they have to wait for the soil to dry out.

“It’s just crazy that one year is one way and one is another,” she says. “We don’t have to go to Las Vegas to gamble, because farming is the biggest gamble there is.”

Related Stories
• Meat Producers And, Ultimately, Consumers Hurt By Drought
• Secret Side Of The Drought: Many Corn Farmers Will Benefit
• Despite Crop Insurance, Drought Still Stings Farmers

Abbie Fentress Swanson reports from Missouri for Harvest Public Media, an agriculture-reporting project involving nine NPR member stations in the Midwest. For more stories about farm and food, check out Harvest Public Media.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Luis Fernando Vasquez has been a coffee farmer in the central valley of Costa Rica his entire life. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

Listen to the Story on Morning Edition

Post by Dan Charles, The Salt at NPR Food (4/24/13)

What does it take to find guilt-free coffee?

Much of our coffee comes from places where the environment is endangered and workers earn very little — sometimes, just a few dollars for a whole day’s work. Coffee farmers have helped cut down tropical forests, and most of them use pesticides.

It doesn’t take much effort, though, to find bags of coffee with labels that promise social and environmental improvements. Among the best-known are Fairtrade or Rain Forest Alliance Certified.

I went to Costa Rica to find out what those labels mean and how well they deliver on their promises.

I visited, for example, a hillside in the country’s central valley, near the town of San Ramon, where Luis Fernando Vasquez grows coffee.

Vasquez loves showing off his farm, which also produces bananas and honey. He’s lived here his whole life and learned to grow coffee from his father. But in the past few years, he says, he’s changed the way he farms.

Luis Fernando Vasquez’s coffee farm in Costa Rica. Vasquez says farmers have changed their methods in recent years. Where they once would cut down trees, he says, “now we are coming to understand that the tree plays a role” in a healthy coffee plant ecosystem. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

“Before, a tree used to be an obstacle, and we’d just cut it down,” he says. “Now, we are coming to understand that the tree plays a role, and it can coexist with our commercial coffee plantation.”

Coffee plants that grow in the shade of trees produce fewer beans, but many people say those beans taste better. In addition, trees help reduce soil erosion and provide a home for wildlife.

Vasquez points at the ground, which is covered by a layer of dead, decaying leaves. “We used to pick all that up, bring it to one central point on the farm and then set it on fire,” he says. “But now I know that if I leave it there, it will actually help improve soil fertility.”

There also have been changes that I can’t see: He’s using fewer pesticides and recycling his trash.

Vasquez is enthusiastic about these changes, but they were not originally his idea.

They’re the result of a long chain of decisions reaching all to way back to American consumers contemplating their many coffee options in the local Stop & Shop.

Several people who are part of that chain are also with me here on the farm.

Fair Trade? Rainforest Alliance? What’s In A Coffee Certification
Learn More About the Different Coffee Certifications Below

Gurdian and his colleagues went to Vasquez and persuaded him to change his farming practices.

Why? “I think that the world is changing right now,” says Gurdian.

To be specific, one of ECOM’s big customers is changing. Nespresso, a coffee business owned by Nestle, has decided that it wants most of its coffee to carry a particular label: Rainforest Alliance Certified.

And Rainforest Alliance, the environmental group behind this label, has a whole set of rules for farmers, called the Sustainable Agriculture Standard.

ECOM took on the job of getting farmers onboard. “We said, ‘OK, it’s time to show the producers that sustainability is OK, and that we can offer lots of benefits, not only for them, the producers, but also for their farms,” says Gurdian.

There was also a small financial incentive. Now that Vasquez, the farmer, is Rainforest Alliance Certified, he gets about 15 cents more for each pound of coffee.

The number of farmers like him is growing. According to Rainforest Alliance, 4.5 percent of all coffee produced in 2012 came from Rainforest Alliance Certified farms. That’s a 45 percent increase over 2011.

There are other labels, of course: fair trade; organic; direct trade.

All of these labels promise slightly different things, and every promise involves some compromises.

For instance: Rainforest Alliance runs a relatively strict system, with independent auditors who inspect farms at random. If the auditors find prohibited pesticides, or workers earning less than the minimum wage, that farm can lose its certification. Sometimes, a whole group of neighboring farms also can be decertified.

You may be glad to know that the program has teeth. On the other hand, those rules shut out many of the smallest, poorest farmers.

Emilia Umaña, who also helps farmers get Rainforest Alliance certification, says the rules ask for things that are too expensive for many small farmers to buy — like special showers for workers to use after applying pesticides. “One of the biggest flaws in the system is that they use the same rule book, worldwide, for every type of producer in every company,” she says.

If you’re specifically interested in helping small farmers, maybe you should look for fair trade coffee. Its whole focus is small coffee producers. Traditionally, all fair trade coffee has come from cooperatives of small producers.

Christian Mora is the general manager of AFAORCA, a fair trade coffee cooperative in Costa Rica. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

Christian Mora is general manager of one of these co-ops, called AFAORCA, in Costa Rica. It has just 24 members.

To get fair trade certification, he says, you have to show a fair trade organization that your cooperative keeps an honest set of books, that it operates democratically, and that it treats workers fairly.

“They come in and interview people who work in the coffee fields, and they make sure that salaries are fair, and that labor rights are respected, according to the law,” he says.

Once certified, the cooperative gets 20 cents extra for every pound of fair trade coffee that it sells. The cooperative then decides how to spend that “social premium.” It could pass the money on to its members, or do something else with it, such as improve a local school.

But there are compromises with fair trade, too. It doesn’t deal with environmental practices on the farms, and some buyers complain that fair trade coffee isn’t always good-quality coffee.

At the moment, in fact, the fair trade movement is going through a bitter split. One group, Fair Trade USA, wants to expand the label so it can include coffee from individual farmers — even big estates.

Mora isn’t happy about this expanded definition of fair trade. “It could be a problem, because the goal of the label gets lost, and it becomes more of a marketing tool for big businesses, and just makes it easier for them to sell their product,” he says.

This tension — between trying to be a real alternative to the mainstream and joining the mainstream — comes up all the time in these certification schemes.

The toughest environmental certification is probably one called Smithsonian Bird Friendly coffee. This coffee is grown organically, with no manufactured fertilizer or pesticides, in fields that also contain 10 different kinds of shade trees. Only a few farmers, though, are willing to grow coffee this way.

Angelina Zuñiga Godinez and Fanny Cordero Mora grow coffee for Coopetarrazu, one of Costa Rica’s largest coffee cooperatives. These bags of coffee are labeled with the towns where they are grow. Photo: Dan Charles/NPR

On the other end of the spectrum, Starbucks runs a really big program called C.A.F.E. Practices (Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices). Like Rainforest Alliance certification, this scheme includes both environmental and social standards, but the Starbucks audits aren’t really tests that a farmer can flunk. They’re more like counseling sessions. If farmers are doing something wrong, Starbucks will tell them how to improve, but it still buys their coffee.

Yet for all their differences and compromises, coffee producers in Costa Rica say these certification systems, collectively, have had a real impact.

Carlos Rivera Chavarria, general manager of one of the country’s largest cooperatives, Coopetarrazu, says certifications all helped farmers to hear what consumers wanted, much more directly than ever before.

These programs allowed his producers to “rediscover quality coffee,” he says.

Coopetarrazu sells coffee under the fair trade label. In addition, some of its farmers are Rainforest Alliance Certified, and the co-op sells a lot of coffee to Starbucks.

Now the co-op is experimenting with “direct trade.” It’s selling small lots of coffee from particular villages to roasters who can pass along the story of that coffee, and that village, to consumers who want to know even more about the sources of their coffee.

What’s In A Certification?

Organic

• Regulates growing methods, prohibiting GMO seeds and synthetic substances
• Forty countries carry organic coffee farms, with the first certified in 1967
• Averages a $0.255/lb increase in market price for coffee producers
• 298 million pounds organic coffee grown in 2010

Fair Trade International

• Seeks to increase welfare for small farmers and communities
• Guarantees a minimum market price plus 10- to 20-cent premium per pound
• Premium is paid to cooperatives to either distribute to farmers or use for community development projects
• 790 million pounds grown in 2010

Rainforest Alliance

• Emphasizes sustainability in social, environmental, economic and ethical areas
• Developed in early 1990s
• Recently gained the support of major buyers including McDonalds and Nespresso
• Expanded from 197 million pounds grown in 2007 to 827 million pounds in 2012

• Promotes biodiversity through the planting of trees for habitat and shade cover
• Requires organic certification and the use of specific trees
• Certification can lead to a 5- to 10-cent premium over organic coffee prices
• One of the smallest certification programs, with approximately 10.4 million pounds of coffee sold in 2011

Starbucks Coffee And Farmer Equity ‘CAFE’

• Verification criteria developed over past 14 years with Conservation International
• Evaluates workers’ rights, benefits, environmental protection and sustainability
• Starbucks aims for 100 percent-certified coffee supply by 2015
• In 2012, 90 percent of supply — approximately 491 million pounds — was from CAFE-verified farms

Copyright 2013 NPR.